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Ornellaia unveils 2020 vintage and picks American artist for special edition bottles

09 February 2023 By Patrick Schmitt

Along with Ornellaia’s launch of its 2020 vintage this week, the top Tuscan wine estate announced the artist chosen to decorate its special edition bottles, which are sold for charity.

Called the Vendemmia d’Artista project, Ornellaia invites an artist to create a design for a limited number of bottles, which is based around a word that is selected each year to describe the character of the vintage.

For 2020, which was launched globally on Tuesday, Ornellaia estate director Axel Heinz has called the vintage ‘La Proporzione’ – meaning proportion’ – in reference to the even nature of the wine, which shows a particular balance in terms of its components and character.

Commenting on the varieties that are used in the blend of Ornellaia – which include Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot – Heinz said that the term ‘proportion’ was apt as “all the grapes expressed themselves very well.” Continuing he said, “Sometimes one variety takes the lead, but that was not the case in 2020, with each grape giving a very important contribution; every one plays a solid and important role.”

Indeed, he earlier noted that for the first time in the history of making Ornellaia, which was launched with the 1985 vintage, that, during one day in September, all four grape varieties were picked at the same time – a unusual situation for an estate that grows the early-ripening Merlot and late-maturing Petit Verdot.

As for the resulting wine, Heinz began by saying that the Ornellaia 2020 “shows that it has been a warm year, with plenty of colour, and it seems as though it has been put in barrel a few weeks ago,” before commenting that “it is intense, and bright, with very ripe fruit.”

Continuing, he said, emphasising the proportionality of the blend, “But at the same time, there is nothing over the top: it is decidedly warm and sunny and ripe, but there is purity in the expression of the fruit; there is richness and focus, with a firm tannin structure and a freshness.”

Summing up, he said, “We feel that 2020 is a classic Ornellaia, and we expect it to age in the way great vintages do,” which means that he “expects it to really develop and blossom” after eight years in bottle, and to “find a peak from 10 to 15 years”.

Concluding, he said that “A wine like 2020 is balanced as a young wine, then complexity will emerge with time, after 8, 10 or 20 years; it is something to be discovered.”

As for the artist chosen for the the Vendemmia d’Artista project, which sees the 2020 Ornellaia celebrate the 15^th edition, American artist Joseph Kosuth has been selected by the Tuscan estate.

Described by Ornellaia as “one of conceptual art’s great practitioners and thinkers,” Kosuth was ask to interpret the idea of proportion.

Kosuth has focused on “the language of art”, with a series of designs centred around the word ‘wine’.

According to information released by the property, Kosuth’s interpretation expresses itself through his design of the labels, both for the 750ml bottle and for larger formats, and culminates in an artwork designed for the estate itself.

Some of the larger bottles will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s online auction, to be held from the 7-21 September this year.

One artistic label designed by Kosuth can be found in each case of six 750ml bottles of Ornellaia 2020, La Proporzione.

This label is printed with a quotation, in English, from Vitruvius De architectura (3.1.3): “Proportion consists in taking a fixed module, in each case, both for the parts of a building and for the whole, by which the method of symmetry is put into practice.”

Meanwhile, the labels on the 100 double magnums show an etymological tree of the word ‘wine‘.

The 10 Imperials, no two of which are the same, have the same etymological chart etched onto the glass. Each Imperial shows a different branch of this tree highlighted in white, with Vitruvius’ quotation translated into that language or into one of its modern descendants: Albanian, Serbo-Croat, Latin, Italian, Hindi, Hebrew, Modern Greek, Irish, German and Armenian. On the unique Salmanazar, meanwhile, the highlighted branch and Vitruvius’ surrounding words are in English.

Speaking about his work on Ornellaia 2020, Kosuth said: “I think that language is an important part of the experience of everything and those experiences are formed in a way linguistically. The architecture of the experience through language was of course always in play and I think that Vitruvius was a great source to understand a concept like proportion. Proportion is not only the balance of elements for the eye, but is also a balance of all the elements that make it an entity of perfection of what it means for the world, thus also forming it as a conception.”

The Vendemmia d’Artista initiative was born in 2006 with the aim of supporting cultural projects. For the last five years, Ornellaia’s proceeds from the Sotheby’s auction have been donated exclusively to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s ‘Mind’s Eye’ program who allows blind and low vision people to access art.